Salty Kiss, Gooseberry Gose…

18/02/2013

Time for our third new beer of the year, and continuing a theme from our Bavarian Pils, ‘Dancing Bear’ we are brewing another traditional German beer style, but one which will be relatively unknown to many UK beer drinkers.

We’re brewing a ‘Gose‘, which as Wikipedia says… belongs to the same family of sour wheat beers which were once brewed across Northern Germany and the Low Countries. Other beers of this family are Belgian Witbier, Gueuze, German Berliner Weisse, and the largely extinct German styles Broyhan and Grätzer.

When Alex Barlow from All Beer asked us if we’d like to host his friend and Danish master brewer Anders Kissmeyer at our brewery for a brew recently, we jumped at the opportunity to make new friends and learn from Ander’s experience.

If you’re not familar with him, Anders has worked in brewing for many years, learning his trade at Carlsberg and after taking inspiration from the fledgling US craft beer scene going on to found one of the first modern Danish craft breweries ‘Nørrebro Bryghus’ in the early 90’s. Anders now travels the world collaborating with brewers under the name ‘Kissmeyer beer’.

Our Italian lady brewerGiada had suggested we try to brew a Gose style beer recently and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to brew it and benefit from Anders years of experience and European brewing knowledge, unfortunately it turns out Anders has never brewed a Gose, but fortunately for us he was just as up for it as we were.

Gose is a top fermented beer style from the German city of Leipzig, which uses at least 50% wheat in the grist, they are by definition tart, herbal and refreshing but what really characterises them is a defined saltiness which traditonally would have come from the particular water in the area they were brewed.

We’re not stupid enough to completely take on 100’s of years of German brewing tradition and regional knowledge so we’ve made a few changes to the method we will use in the production of the beer, all of which should give us the best chance of making the beer representative of the style.

In true collaborative spirit Anders felt we should also bring an Anglo-Danish element to the beer; we agreed and so we’ll be adding Gooseberries for some English fruit and tartness typical of the style. The Danish ingredients will be additions of Sea Buckthorn and Rosehips; these additions should hopefully add a complimentary astringency as well as some subtle fragrance and flavour. It turns out both Sea Buckthorn and Rosehips are also absolutely packed with antioxidants and vitamins should you need another excuse to try the beer.

The beer should be ready in a couple of weeks and is all destined for keg, as ever we’d love to know what you think of it. If you’d like to read more about Anders Kissmeyer there’s an excellent article from a couple of years ago here . If you’d like to read up on Gose as a style there’s some great info here and here